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I’ll show you mine in a minute. But, first, show me yours.
And you’re not allowed to say Clay Aiken, Miley Cyrus or something silly like that. Even Vanilla Ice. Those guys don’t count. They’re awful. But they’re not really music. They’re just hula hoops. Some unholy combo of popcult ephemera and music-biz corruption. No, a worst band ever has to be something someone else thinks is meaningful. They have to be part of the actual musico-historical conversation. Gotta have, well, gravitas, even if they suck.
My son, a music scribe in his own right (and inspirer of this idea), nominates the Red Hot Chili Peppers, just to start the fire (speaking of good candidates for worst – Billy Joel). Even if I don’t entirely agree, the Peppers seem like an exemplary choice: a band that many revere, that are credited with innovation and with chops and cool and that seem to have ascended to the rock ’n’ roll canon, if not yet the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (a goldmine, I would submit, of worstness – especially in 2010) (and, late-breaking news, now including the Chili Peppers!).
But that doesn’t mean your pick has to be an old band – though you’re going to have a hard time making a case for an artist with less than ten years of output, because some of these guys wind up redeeming youthful excrescence with breakthrough work in their maturity (Justin Timberlake, anyone?). And it’s not enough to name the name, you also have to make the case. Give us a sentence or two. Help us fully grok their true awfulness.
So, nominate your all-time worst band, email your pick to worstband@duncanchannon.com before November 1, 2009. We’ll publish the top ten disses and send each winning correspondent a FREE, USED CD of Celine Dion’s My Love – Ultimate Essential Collection!!! Now for mine – except it’s too damn hard to pick just one:
At last it can be told: Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, from hip-hop’s seminal and legendary Run DMC, officially and completely blew the roof off the Tip at a secret birthday party this past Saturday night. The recent Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, performing with local DJ Sol, rocked the mic for four tunes, including an incendiary “Walk This Way,” and then posed for pics with everybody and their brother/mother/cousin – including not a few gobstruck D/C creative directors. Word.
6/28/09, Hyde Park, London, backstage at Hard Rock Calling
– What’re you doing here?
– I’m working for Hard Rock… What are you doing here?
– Uh-huh…
– That was great, you goin’ up onstage with those guys [Gaslight Anthem]?
– Yeah…
– Really cool. Really fun.
– Yeah… [Hug.] Good to see ya, Bobby.
This all hit me in Buenos Aires a year or so ago when I turned the corner in a museum and saw a famous painting, described in the nameplate as:
“Self-portrait with Monkey and Parrot. Frida Kahlo, 1907–1954.”
I know it seems the height of philistinism, but I always read nameplates first. And, in this case, maybe because I’d seen the image on a million totebags, it was the nameplate, rather than the painting, that affected me most. And mostly because it told me I was alive at the same time as a nigh-mythical figure from impossibly remote history.
Now I’m sure it’s not a good and honorable way to respond to art (can you say “narcissistic personality disorder”?). But it did get me to wondering, who else? What other surprising historical figures from what seems like way, way back were alive – and maybe alive nearby – same time as me?
Doing the exercise, it turns out a lot of them were musicians, which is how I justify putting them here:
It is dark and it is cold in January in Detroit. Darker and colder than you’re imagining now. And you are broke. You’ve been amicably tossed, but tossed nonetheless, from your railroad flat in NYC because your childhood buddy, Mark the Shark (he of later Studio 54 celebrity), who more or less owns the place, wants his girlfriend to move in. Actually, she’s in already – they just want a little privacy. Besides, you are a few months behind on the rent, as dirt cheap as it might be, because you are really broke.
And here you are. Detroit in the dead of January.
You know John Morthland from Sausalito, where you lived for ten months, on a lark, after abandoning New York the first time and whom you had met through Ed Ward, the ex-Rolling Stone writer (now “rock historian” on Fresh Air), who gave you your start with an assignment to review Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade. John Morthland’s a really good writer and editor and an amazingly prescient musicologist who was first to discover a lot of things pop-cultural that eluded most rock critics, or at least white ones. Things like rap music (before it was hip hop), Sacred Steel and Moe Bandy. He’s in Detroit to be interim editor – interim, because John is strictly freelance or die. And you know him, it should be clarified, only pretty well, though that may be as well as most anyone knows silent, staring, inscrutably smirking John.
You don’t know Lester.
You know of him, but barely, and as much on the strength of that seemingly concocted name – Lester Bangs – as his writing.
On this Easter Sunday of Passover weekend, we should all be grateful for the latest resurrection of Terry Adams – he of the perennially passed-over NRBQ, America’s greatest cult band.
His new album’s called Holy Tweet. And while it’s not out till the end of the week, it got a sweet review from Ben Ratliff in today’s Times, and you should definitely plan on appending it to your music collection. And even if you don’t grok it at first, even if it seems too silly or too poppy, too accessible or even too willfully obscure, you’ll eventually discover that you’ve not only had a good time, but learned something. And then you’ll see the genius of Terry, the Hohner Clavinet-slapping heart of the Q.
I’m not the first to tout NRBQ – Elvis Costello left out the “cult” part when he called them “the best band in America” and Penn Jillette said they were the “best band in the world” – but I could’ve been. My life has crisscrossed theirs at odd intervals for 40 years.
NRBQ (which stands for New Rhythm & Blues Quintet/Quartet) were a Next Big Thing when their first self-titled album came out on Columbia in 1969. On the other hand, I was just another NBT-aspirant, nose to the glass of New York’s 48th Street music row, when I first encountered the band, parading in self-consciously single file down the opposite sidewalk. Even the way they walked seemed unique and, I would soon discover, uniquely Q.
Part I: Friday night, Grammys minus two: Return to forever.
Last time we went to Michael’s in Santa Monica they had a dress code. That’s how long ago it was. Back then, circa 1980, Roni Hofman (my missus) was having an art show at a gallery in Hollywood, and we were out from New York for the opening. Which was pretty glam, except we were also pretty broke. So our pal Sandy Pearlman – he of Blue Öyster Cult, “more cowbell” fame (hi, Sandy) – offered to take us out to the hottest new restaurant in town.
We arrive at Michael’s, and it turns out they have this dress code. Now Sandy, an uberhip music producer, has never been much for jackets, let alone ties – unless they’re Swedish paratrooper jackets. And we’ve made the trip all the way out to Santa Monica from the rockin’ Sunset Marquis, and the maitre d’ is saying to Pearlman: Sir, you’ll need a jacket and tie.
I totally blew it with this year’s top 10 (see preceding post). I’m not sure how it happened. Too much angel dust at the Tipmas party? The faceplant in the Porta-Potty on New Year’s Eve? Who knows? But I wanted to sincerely apologize to all of you who count on me to deliver 100% accurate, factual, dependable musical information and who I have so sorely disappointed.
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